The present disclosure relates to wind turbines. Particularly, the present disclosure relates to a wind turbine rotor blade and a wind turbine including such a wind turbine rotor blade.
Although horizontal axis wind turbines are well-established these days, there is still considerable engineering effort going on to further improve their overall efficiency, robustness, and power generating capability.
This research has lead to the most recent active flow control (AFC) technologies which aim to improve wind turbine efficiency. AFC technologies try to avoid flow separation over rotor blades by actively modifying the wind flow proximate to the rotor blade. This can be achieved by ejecting gas through apertures formed in the surface of the rotor blade.
The introduction of such AFC systems has brought about the fact that the apertures used for blowing gas eventually collect dirt or impurities. This phenomenon is one aspect of the so-called blade fouling. Blade fouling can substantially lower the performance, in particular the extracted power of wind turbines.